Savannah

How to Dice an Onion

This is the most efficient way to dice an onion that I’ve ever seen. Efficiency when cutting an onion does a couple of things for you:

The faster you cut an onion the less time the gases have to volatilize and make you cry.

Your onion pieces will all be the same size which means they will all cook evenly.

You look like a badass in the kitchen. 😎

So let’s start! This is how an onion grows in the ground. The stem end faces upward and the root end faces downward into the soil. We want to keep the root end on, that’s going to be our handle. If you’re not sure which end is the root end, it’s the one that looks like a scraggly, brown spider.

The first cut should be used to create a flat surface so your onion isn’t rolling around. So go ahead and cut off the stem end *chop*!

Next, with your onion sitting on the flat surface you just made, cut through the middle of the root, cutting the onion completely in half. Try and leave some root on either side of the onion.

Go ahead and peel off the top layers of the onion letting the onion tell you where it wants to be peeled. You’ll see here I took off an entire layer of the onion, not just the brown skin. That’s because life is too short to spend it fighting with an onion peel that flakes off in small, annoying bits.

You’ll notice here, the onion is already segmented horizontally. So I don’t need to make any cuts that direction.

Lay your peeled onion on it’s flat surface.

Now this is the important part, start making vertical cuts down the onion but make sure you’re not cutting so high up that the pieces come loose from the stem.

Next, lay your onion back down and simply slice across the onion the other direction. Notice how my fingers holding the onion are always curled? I’m holding the onion mainly with my fingertips. This way if my knife slips, I will only scrape my knuckles a little instead of losing a fingertip.

When the onion gets wobbly and hard to cut, flop it over on (surprise!) its flat surface. And continue cutting until you have nothing left but the root.

And there you have it! You can now professionally dice an onion and with this method you will probably save years off your life because with a little practice, you will be cutting onions so fast. 😉